Career Development Strategies

Workshop

The ‘golden rules’ of career development

Understanding the key concepts and underlying principles that are involved in building and maintaining a successful career.

• Assessment of the ‘golden rules’ of career development
• Reviewing the key principles
• Making changes to your approach

Exercise: Analysing essential concepts in successful career development

Designing your ‘personal brand’

Having a ‘personal brand’ simply means developing and promoting a consistent image of what you are good at and how you ‘add value’ to your organisation. It begins by first assessing your strengths and weaknesses, and then translating that analysis into a description of how you want others to think of you.

• Assessment of core values
• Describing your value proposition
• Understanding how to ‘live your brand’

Exercise: Drafting a ‘personal brand’ statement

The role of the Career Plan

Highly effective people have a structured approach for progressing their careers within their organisations. They have a view of the kinds of roles they want to have and a sense of the timescales in which they would like to have them. They do not rely on chance to get progress, but actively develop their skills to ensure that they are seen as a viable candidate for promotion when a suitable opportunity arises.

• The ‘ideal’ end role
• Stepping stones
• Current role
• Acquiring core Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes for success

Exercise: Completing the Career Plan Matrix

Development planning

People get promoted and recognised because they have the desire to progress their careers and because they actively work on developing key skills, with the guidance of influential supporters. Here we assess what it takes to develop ‘promotability’ in the three key areas defined by the PIE model.

• The PIE model audit
• Development needs
• The importance of a mentor

Exercise: Completing the PIE audit and developing action plans

Marketing yourself

Although in many cultures it is a challenging thing to do, tactful ‘self promotion’ is a key component of career development. Here we look at some of the tools for communicating your achievements and positive qualities to key people within the organisation.

• Using ‘social media’
• The ‘elevator speech’
• Stories and anecdotes
• Your personal advertising plan

Exercise: Practise in using elevator speeches

Action plans

Discussing how to implement the learning from the workshop into daily life.